Talk:Numerical Recipes

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You have new messages (last change).

I deleted the following section from the article:

Negative criticism of the books, almost without exception, has one or more of the following characteristics:
  • It refers to the first edition
  • It is nonspecific
  • It is anonymous
  • It is unsupported by citations or reference to "better" techniques
  • Assertions of "efficiency" are not quantitative
  • It cites numerous "bugs" that have long since been corrected
  • It claims something like "serious scholars have long since derided <some NR algorithm that is not explicitly named> and now "modern techniques" are in use, all without specific citations
  • It claims something like "the book seems OK at first glance but serious analysis of 'my specialist area' shows that at least this part of the book is deficient"
As such, much of the negative criticism of the book has much in common with urban myth or pseudoscience.

In my opinion, this is not a fair reflection of the complaints which have been mentioned in reviews about the books. I replaced the above fragment with a summary of the main critisms. -- Jitse Niesen 18:24, 5 May 2004 (UTC)


Hi Jitse

I liked your NPOV rephrasing of my bullet points. If anything, your phrasing makes the case for NR more strongly than my rather more explicit list. I particularly liked the bit about clear and intelligible programs being efficient.

Notwithstanding that, all the complaints about the book that I have seen DO adhere to the bullet points...I'd be very interested to see any complaints you have about NR that we could discuss.


best wishes

Robinh 20:19, 5 May 2004 (UTC)

Robin, I'm glad that you like my changes. All reviews about NR that I've read (which are just a few) refer to the first edition (except for the reviews of the Fortran 90 book, which is quite different); however, I think it is quite natural that the second edition of a book is not reviewed as widely as the first edition. So it's not so much that the text which I deleted is not true, it's only that I did not like the tone, especially of the last sentence.

As for my personal opinion about NR: I have only browsed through it and I've heard people talking about it, so I don't feel qualified to give a definitive opinion, but my impression is not that bad. I think that people using NR should be warned that it's not the final word; a lot of theory and alternative algorithms is omitted (as is necessary for a book of this scope), and the writing style may cause some people to forget this. However, the book seems quite okay as an introduction for non-mathematicians (I think it has too little analysis for mathematicians), and if you just have an easy problem that you want to solve numerically, that's all you need.

I hope that clarifies my position a bit. All the best, Jitse Niesen 00:08, 6 May 2004 (UTC)

PS: I just added a section on software in Numerical Analysis mentioning NR, which you are welcome to review. Jitse Niesen 00:51, 6 May 2004 (UTC)

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../n/u/m/Talk%7ENumerical_Recipes_10be.html"